Rekindling old flames
Published: 08 April, 2009
As Europe seeks to secure its energy future by tapping African resources, reducing its dependence on Russian gas, Moscow is rekindling an old interest in Africa.
At 10pm Moscow time on January 1 2009, Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, fulfilled its promise to neighbouring Ukraine and shut the taps on gas supplies heading westwards. Ukraine owed Russia more than $2bn, and despite Kiev paying off part of the debt before the deadline, the Russians took extreme action. A few days later, supplies in countries further west began to fail, as a dispute over transit rights through Ukraine saw Gazprom reduce its use of the route.
What began as a dispute over an unpaid bill – albeit a large one – escalated into a dispute that dragged on for almost three weeks. It reignited fears within Europe that Gazprom was becoming too powerful a foreign policy tool for Russia, and refocused minds in the European Union on deepening the energy relationship that the EU has with Africa.
Gazprom was borne out of the USSR’s Ministry of the Gas Industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. It inherited control over some of the largest gas reserves in the world with proximity to the huge Western European market. Throughout the 1990s, the company expanded its operations westwards, signing strategic alliances and taking stakes in joint ventures with other European companies. Today it is the largest natural gas company in the world.
For many in Europe and further afield who still view Gazprom as an extension of Russia’s foreign policy apparatus, the company’s actions in January marked a continuation of the country’s resurgent desire to project power and reassert its influence on Eastern Europe after a few years of relative dormancy on the international stage. This culminated in August 2008 with a conflict in Georgia, seen as a pro-US thorn in Russia’s side. Viewed in that context, it is easy to see why many believed that Ukraine – which is broadly divided between pro-Russian and pro-Western factions and is seen as drifting westwards in its outlook – was ‘targeted’, with the unpaid bill offering a convenient excuse.
Certainly politics and energy have never strayed far from each other’s company, and the presence of Russian prime minister – and former president – Vladimir Putin at the negotiating table did little to quell suspicions.
When, three years ago to the day, Gazprom made a similar move, it prompted a degree of soul-searching at the EU. This eventually resulted in the Second Strategic Energy Review, a document that included a focus on renewables and a declared intent to diversify the EU’s supply base by deepening its energy relationship with North and West Africa.
This was given a further degree of formality at the second EU-Africa summit in Lisbon in December 2007, where the union released a broad agenda of cooperation in energy, development, trade, migration and security. Reflective of a growing understanding within the EU that the many strands of its approach towards Africa needed to be drawn together into a coherent, holistic policy, the Lisbon summit opened with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso underlining the new approach in unequivocal terms.
